Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Gets SAP's Stamp of Approval

The company's database server software is certified to run SAP-based workloads on-premises or on Microsoft's cloud.

SAP, the German business software giant, has certified Microsoft SQL Server 2014 to run its NetWeaver-based applications. NetWeaver is the software foundation that underpins many of SAP's applications and enables them to integrate with other applications.
"Now you can run even more of your Tier-1, mission-critical workloads on SQL Server," Microsoft's SQL team announced in a company blog post. "And, the ability to run SAP on Microsoft Azure means that it can be accomplished with low total cost of ownership (TCO)."
Billing the cloud- and big data-friendly software as an Internet of things (IoT) building block, Microsoft launched the latest edition of SQL Server on April 15, 2014, during a customer event in San Francisco. Among its key capabilities is the ability to leverage in-memory computing systems.
"This release completely brings in-memory capability to all [workloads]—OLTP, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence," CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement during the launch festivities.

SAP's nod enables customers to branch out onto Microsoft's massive, globe-spanning Azure cloud infrastructure.
Possible scenarios include leveraging "development and test environments in the cloud that can be spun up and scaled out as needed," according to the company. "SQL Server 2014 also introduced Disaster Recovery to Azure using an asynchronous AlwaysOn secondary, which can make Azure a part of your SAP disaster recovery plan."
SAP, meanwhile, is a company in transition.
Last May, CTO Vishal Sikka resigned, citing personal reasons amid an executive shakeup that did away the company's dual-CEO leadership structure. Sikka was a key developer of HANA (high-performance analytic appliance), SAP's own in-memory processing platform, which has evolved into the company's flagship offering as businesses seek to draw near-instant insights from the mountains of data produced by their systems.
"I would like to personally thank Vishal for his contribution to take SAP to this stage," Hasso Plattner, company co-founder and a fellow principal of the HANA project, said in a statement at the time. "We will remain friends as he pursues the next step in his journey."
In October, SAP inked a major deal with IBM, extending the availability of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to Big Blue's cloud. "The demand for SAP HANA and the SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA in the cloud is tremendous and this global agreement with IBM heralds a new era of cloud collaboration," SAP CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement.
And last month, the company announced that it had retooled its main application, SAP Business Suite, to run on the HANA platform. Dubbed SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, the mobile-enabled, in-memory enhanced software can be deployed on the cloud, on-premise or in hybrid cloud setups.